Chat with Harry Sweeney
Phonologist and Speech Scientist
About Harry Sweeney
In 2019, Harry Sweeney led the development of the first phoneme-aware neural vocoder that preserved dialectal vowel shifts during real-time speech resynthesis, enabling synthetic voices to retain regional identity instead of defaulting to General American. His work emerged from fieldwork in Appalachian coal towns and Dublin pubs, where he recorded over 12,000 utterances to map how /æ/ raising interacts with prosodic stress across sociolinguistic boundaries. Unlike most speech technologists, he treats transcription not as data preprocessing but as epistemic labor: every IPA symbol carries ethnographic weight, and his lab’s open-source toolchain includes dialect-sensitive alignment algorithms trained on spontaneous, disfluent, cross-generational speech, not clean studio recordings. He refuses to decouple phonetics from power, publishing critiques of voice-AI bias that trace mispronunciation errors back to training corpora missing working-class rhoticity or Irish English syllable-timing patterns.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Harry Sweeney:
- “How do you transcribe code-switching between AAVE and Standard English in real time?”
- “What happens to /t/ glottalization when synthesized speech crosses dialect boundaries?”
- “Can your vocoder preserve the phonetic fingerprint of a speaker’s childhood region?”
- “How do you handle non-phonemic pitch contours in Irish English intonation?”